a blog by Ian Kennedy
Matthew Haughey says all this fuss over the Mainstream Media is meaningless when so many bloggers are now on TV and magazine publishers are now blogging. We are all the media and the line that defines mainstream has gotten so fuzzy as to be meaningless.
Amen to that brother.
It’s going to be another busy week – BusinessWeek has a lengthy cover story on why companies need to pay attention to blogs.
Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.
At the same time BusinessWeek Online launched five new blogs (powered by Movable Type) at Blogspotting.net
Bill Gross’ Idealab launches Insider Pages which takes a shot at local listings, combines it with a recommendation engine and adds a touch of social networking. Damn, that was my idea. Where did I put that napkin anyway?
If I were the Yellow Pages I would be worried. Very worried. They even use the Yellow Pages name (it’s not copyrighted is it?) in their tag line “Yellow Pages written by friends”
Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion notices that a recent article about Podcasting carried on the BBC website included photos that were taken by a Flickr user. It is not clear if they had gotten permission to do so from the user but they clearly were not credited as a source.
This is the first time I can think of that an established media site included material without attribution and also brings up an interesting point about using RSS feeds and Search Engines as an alternative to the traditional newswires (AP, Reuters, PR Newswire) for sources of republished material.
The article did not credit the photographer, camoby, so it’s unclear if the BBC purchased these images or if he works on staff or he simply let them use the photos gratis. His web site, however, does feature a BBC ticker. What’s known is that these images were not published under a Creative Commons license.
As a friend of mine noted when the news of Flickr’s purchase by Yahoo was announced, “Who owns the photos on Flickr and is Yahoo or anyone else going to profit from the sale of images of my family without my knowledge?” Ads around Flickr images on either Flickr or Yahoo are one thing but distribution to other sites is another thing entirely. Let alone, did Adam Curry release these images as well?
Topix.net, the automated news aggregation service, has taken on investment from Knight-Ridder, Gannett, and the Tribune Co. The idea is to gain some financial backing to grow the service but also to gain access to content from media companies that they were negotiating with anyway. I think each of these companies look at Topix as a distribution channel which is a wonderful validation of this business model of having third parties re-package snippets of content for ad-supported redistribution.
Remaining editorially independent is key and there are assurances from Topix that they will remain so. I guess I feel much better that it’s a triumvirate each owning 25% of Topix and not a single media entity. The will need to learn to share.
The folks at SFist write about their dinner with Yahoo where they get an insight into some of the economic shifts that are a result of the changes in the media landscape.
Greg pointed out that in the past, papers could depend on classified ads accounting for up to 35% of their revenue. Now they’re lucky if it represents 15%. And Susan’s friend Bob, who was nice enough to give us a ride back up 101, noted that 93% of businesses in San Francisco have fifty or fewer employees, and that as print publications increase their ad rates to account for revenue shortfalls, small, local businesses are being shut out of much needed publicity, which opens the door for chains and franchises who can subsidize the increased media costs.
In case you missed it, here’s a link to the hilarious commentary on Jon Stewart’s Daily show about the Jeff Gannon and Eason Jordon blowouts and bloggers in general.
The Washington Post, you heard it here 12th.
Brilliant.
Alameda Island, where I live, is one of the more wired neighborhoods in the Bay Area. This morning I whipped off a quick email while waiting for the bus by jumping on the open wireless connection at the Mexican place, La Pinata, across the street. They sell burritos and they’ve got high-speed internet!
As many who work in the online business have found, I’ve stopped
watching television or reading the national dailies for my news fix and
now rely pretty much on my RSS reader and occasional web site to push
me the news of the day. Yet, despite the wireless and despite all the local resources you can find online, I still love the fact that this community of 70,000 can support two local papers. The Alameda Journal (pictured) is a Knight-Ridder publication and gets whipped onto our front door step twice a week and the Alameda Sun makes it once a week.
There is something about a local rag that just fits. Nothing like walking out to catch the bus, stooping down to scoop up the paper and seeing your local electrician on the cover. Taking the ride into the city you can read how the high school soccer team did over the weekend and that your neighbor’s daughter scored a goal, browse the police blotter and see that a few more cars were broken into over on the other side of Fernside, then note that the Foote’s old house sold for over $750k. This is just stuff you wouldn’t spend the time looking for online – it’s just works better in print.
It’s all advertising supported – I don’t think I’d pay for a subscription – but I will say that when I’m looking for something to do or for a local service, the paper is a resource that I still use right next to the yellow pages.
The Online Journalism Review inteviews Martin Nisenholtz of NY Times Digital who is a ready counter-argument to Dan Gillmor’s call for a freeing of the archives. Until banner ad revenues outstrip the royalties they curently earn from subscription databases such as Factiva and Lexis-Nexis, there is no way they’re opening up the barn door.
“We’re not about to give away something that the marketplace is paying a huge premium for already,” Nisenholtz told me, “unless you could get a lot more than that premium in some other way, which you can’t, believe me, there’s no way. There’s no analysis to show that Google AdWords gets you anything close to what we make on archives on the Web — never mind all the money we make on the after-market sales. It’s so ridiculous as to be laughable.
It’s a marketplace of a few vendors serving up proprietary content on closed systems vs. a more sustainable marketplace of any and every website around the world looking to link to and reference New York’s paper of record. And what about The Long Tail?